HCMV is a human pathogen of considerable importance and there is a demand for an effective vaccine against it. Hitherto experimental vaccines have been based on attenuated, non-pathogenic forms of the virus, but these can have undesirable side effects. The invention provides an alternative approach to the production of a vaccine against HCMV, using recombinant DNA techniques.
Like other herpes viruses HCMV specifies multiple glycoproteins (1,2). Characterisation of these have involved studies of CMV-infected cells and purified virions using polyclonal sera and monoclonal antibodies (2-10). One glycoprotein has been partially purified and shown to elicit a neutralising response in guinea pigs. However, the total number of HCMV-specified glycoproteins remains uncertain and the vaccine potential of individual glycoproteins is unknown. Purification of individual glycoproteins from HCMV-infected cells is a daunting prospect because the virus grows slowly and fails to shut down host cell protein synthesis during infection.